Millennials are generally considered those who were born between 1981 and 1996. The cutoff year was chosen since it highlights the political, economic, and social factors that defined their formative years.
For example, most Millennials were old enough to understand the significance of 9/11, unlike Gen Z who were still very young and could not comprehend the attacks when they occurred. Millennials also grew up during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Additionally, technology impacted Millennials since the generation aged amid the internet's rise — for Gen Z, technology is second nature, but millennials had to adapt to the ever-expanding social media and online communication advancements.
Since 1968, or roughly four years after the end of the baby boom, educational attainment has steadily grown, and by the 2020s about 4 in 10 American Millennials had earned a bachelor’s degree or higher, making them more educated than any previous generation.
The rise in educational attainment has been especially sharp for young women. (More millennial women than men possess bachelor’s degrees or higher.)
However, many Millennials in the United States and Europe entered the workforce at the height of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. They faced particularly high unemployment rates, and those who could find work were usually underemployed or in jobs that did not match their degrees.
The difficulty in securing employment lowered Millennials' potential earnings and hindered their ability to grow wealth.
Scholars have noted that millennials in the West are the first modern generation to be economically worse off than their parents.
In the United States, their difficult economic situation was compounded by student loans. The number of young adult households with student debt doubled between 1998, when Gen X was between the ages of 18 to 33, and 2016, when millennials were 20 to 35. Moreover, the median amount of outstanding student debt was greater for millennials ($19,000) than for Gen X ($12,800).
The recession also restrained Millennials' ability to save money to purchase a home, which, combined with limited housing stock and sharply rising prices, has resulted in fewer Millennials owning their own homes.
For comparison, in Britain in 1998, when the average age of Gen Xers was 27, 55 percent of that cohort owned their home. However, when millennials were of the same average age, in 2014, only 32 percent were homeowners.
